Larry Niven - The Barsoom Project

“Sin!” said the black man.

“Sin!” agreed the white and the yellow men.

“It only remains to pronounce sentence-”

“Ah say! Now just a cotton-pickin’ minute there, boy!” The voice was Foghorn Leghorn’s, and every head snapped around

Johnny Welsh had spoken. A moment later he was hypersupercilious. “I believe this is my field of expertise-do you mind, Robin?”

“Not at all.” The distinguished actor looked both surprised and relieved. Bowles sat heavily.

Johnny paused, gathering himself. “You know-I don’t think the issue here is the killing of animals-the more people you have, the more food you need. Having babies is honored in your culture-in fact, anything that builds up the community. Am I right? Couples without children pray for babies. It’s expected that we be fruitful and multiply, right?”

The Eskimo judge nodded sagely.

“All right. The meat-packing industry is just trying to feed our babies. If we didn’t do that, that would be a sin. We want more of our babies to survive. So we have people who are doctors, and engineers, and teachers, and cops, and everything else that it takes for a society to survive. We’re like fishermen who stock the lakes, or the farms, or whatever. And we kill the animals as humanely as we can. Is there really anything more humane about dying with a spear through your guts at twenty below? A gut-shot reindeer-Trianna?”

Trianna had a plump arm up. She said, “The dietary rules in the Torah demand that kosher meat be slaughtered as humanely as possible. I’m sure that every culture has rules like that.”

Johnny beamed approval. Orson’s head was up; his eyes were unfocused.

The Oriental judge peered down at Trianna. “Not every culture. Japan differs. And where exactly does this line of reasoning lead you?”

Welsh mocked the Oriental’s tones. “It leads me to believe the issue is whether we have honored the spirits of the animals. You think that Charlie the Tuna, and Ferdinand the Bull, and Chicken Boy, and Tom Turkey and the rest are insults to their spirit.”

The judges nodded vigorously. “And so they are!”

Johnny shook his head; his cheeks jiggled. “No. You missed it. Where we come from, one of the highest forms of compliment is the joke. I know this stuff. I make my living with this stuff. Only after an actor or politician has become great do we bother to make jokes about him. if there is a disaster in our lives, the first thing we try to do is find the light side. That’s how we keep things in perspective. It’s how we survive.”

Johnny was beginning to roll, and Max finally understood where he was going. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Orson relax.

“When we take a chicken, or a cow, and make a cartoon out of it, we’re giving ‘em the same treatment we give our dogs and cats. And considering that dog and cat care is a multibilliondollar industry, you’d better not even suggest we don’t love the little fuzzballs. They end up running our homes, eating our food, and breaking our hearts. Oh yeah-we know damned well how much we depend on animals for our survival.”

Orson leapt up. “Snow Goose’s father showed us implements, utensils that had carved images of animals. Out of proportion, almost grotesque. What we would call ‘caricatures.’ I submit to you that these advertisements are our offerings to the Inua. They are our way of giving affectionate respect. And more than that, we don’t just make one or two little carved-bone items. We send these images out to billions of people. Every day we pay more honor to the Inua of the animals than the Inuit peoples did in a century. We are absolutely in the spirit of the Eskimos, and we say that you have lied, and stolen, and tricked your way into the balance of power. We ask the Gods, whatever they be, to look into our hearts. Every time we say grace, every time we make a joke, every time somebody works overtime to make a little more money so he can spend two hundred bucks on sushi for four, it’s a tribute. I call this whole damn thing a mistrial.”

The judges seemed frozen. Only their faces were in motion but their features were little lost sins randomly a-crawl. Then the judges began to come apart. One buzzing voice spoke, the voice of west/white/Europe. “No-you are lying… we have the right of inheritance! We have that right!”

The ocean above them swirled, the water beginning to boil, and the walls dissolving too. Piece by horrid piece, Sin City was falling apart. The water boiled more swiftly. They clung to the strands of hair, dug in their tiny claws; the current took them away.

Then all was hidden in a wash of bubbles.

It felt like Sedna’s scalp was sagging beneath Max. Then the bubbles cleared, and he saw. He was in a bubble and the bubble was rising. The other Gamers were rising around him, each in his own bubble.

Welles sat back and relaxed-the rest of it was programmed. He pushed himself away from the console and yawned, suddenly aware of the massive energy output of the past forty minutes.

He heard a patter of applause and turned to see Dr. Vail’s slender, sardonic figure at the door of the control room, a beer in each hand. “Thirsty?”

“Unbelievably.” Welles snatched one before Vail could blink, and downed half before coming up for air. “Ahhh. I pay belated honor to the Inua of the beer.”

“That was nicely done,” Vail said. “And we’ve almost completed our programming.”

Welles made puppy eyes. “Does that mean I can start killing them? Please, sir. Just a few of ‘em. For their own good.”

He drank in haste, then called up an image from the Tunnels, the subterranean world beneath the Gaming areas. A cluster of uniformed men and women were working hydraulic lifts, switching supports and props under the Gamers so that they could make their ascent.

“I still can’t believe how many Gamers don’t care how we do it.”

Vail sipped his brew, watched the screen, lips curled with gentle humor. “I’ll bet you read magic books when you were a kid, and told everybody how the lady turns into a tiger.”

“Better. There was an old magician in town. He put on shows in a magic shop, and on Saturday night, he’d get drunk. He’d screw up his timing, and you could see the rabbit peeking out of his coat. I loved it.”

“The fact that the old man had lost it?”

Welles took another drink. “Is that wrong? He’d lost it just enough so that I could see how the miracle was done. Maybe some of the other people laughed, but I thought: ‘He used to be great. Now he’s just good.”

He drained his beer and tossed it. “Hell. Anybody can be good. It only takes practice. But looking at that old man, for the first time in my life I thought that maybe I could be great…” He rubbed his eyes, then looked at Vail with sudden suspicion. “Are you working on my Psych evaluation?”

“Tut-tut,” Vail said innocently. “Just curious. Just curious.”

Max looked down through the water, and he saw Her.

Sedna. Eskimo, or Inuit, and beautiful. The encrustations around her face were cracking and chipping away, revealing smooth brown flesh beneath.

She was still burdened by her load of sins, but many of them were breaking free, unable to maintain their hold.

Sedna had a chance. The universe was coming back into balance. The Paija beaten, the angakoks could cleanse Sedna if the road remained clear…

Above them, far above them, light sparkled and shimmered on the surface of the water.

A rocket rose up the sky… up the dome of Gaming A, off to Alex Griffin’s left. At first the launch looked normal enough. But stratospheric winds twisted the vapor trail into a bizarre knot of subliminal skywriting, and the oversized Phoenix craft still hadn’t tipped over to make orbit. It was roaring straight up. The flame died, but the tiny silver dot kept rising. if something else didn’t happen it would presently come roaring straight down.